Mario Antoine Aoun

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Angelica Lo Duca |Bennie Mols |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun

We often work with various datasets ranging from healthcare and tourism to finance. As technical experts, we excel at analyzing them, building sophisticated models, and crafting visually appealing dashboards. Yet, one skill we often overlook is communicating these insights to people who don’t share our domain expertise.

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth

As an undergraduate at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, Richard Sutton pored through the school’s library, trying to read everything he could about learning and machine intelligence. What he found disappointed him, because he did not think it really got to the heart of the matter. “It was mostly pattern recognition. It was mostly learning from examples. And I knew from psychology that animals do very different things,” Sutton said.

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth

The examples are nothing if not relatable: preparing breakfast, or playing a game of chess or tic-tac-toe. Yet the idea of learning from the environment and taking steps that progress toward a goal apparently was under-studied when ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards.